I want to know what other people who have read this book have thought about it?

I read it a few years ago and found it very interesting from an IT perspective. Even before reading the book I had an innate interest in DevOps and reading one is considered to be one of the best “DevOps” books out there was a lot more fun than expected! It doesn’t hurt its a well written novel, and not just some random over priced text book haha.

So I do recommend it for anyone thinking about DevOps, or anyone who likes reading about IT managers in need of help haha.

Yes, I do read it just a month ago.
While I love to read about IT in a non-tech way like this novel, I think that is a buzzy-fuzzy in the aura of the main character Bill Palmer, something like he is the only man in the Company that all departments are against . Meantime I really recommend that book for those who are interested in DevOps…

@bradtaniguchi
Funny enough when I was reading it, I could see so many Bill’s in real life including myself in some cases.

I find in more non-tech companies you see more Bills because most departments don’t care about technology. They treat it as another machine or appliance they need to do their work. And when things don’t work… they look at the tech leader as the source of the problem.

Anyway, super entertaining book and if you work in tech you’ll have an odd feeling of having met some of these characters in real life.

I always wanted to think of myself as Chris (Head of development) or Brent (IT guru), but there isn’t really a “hero dev” character in the book, which kind of sucked as all the changes are demanded at the highest level, but executed at the lower levels haha.

Now the “hero dev” character is the main protagonist of the sequel book the Unicorn Project, which I just finished up reading. I liked it more if not just as much as the first one, but then I’m a dev so I am biased haha.

I find in more non-tech companies you see more Bills because most departments don’t care about technology. They treat it as another machine or appliance they need to do their work. And when things don’t work… they look at the tech leader as the source of the problem.

This reminds me that I need to re-watch IT Crowd.

bradtaniguchi:

Now the “hero dev” character is the main protagonist of the sequel book the Unicorn Project, which I just finished up reading.

I didn’t know a sequel exists. Is the scope the same as the Phoenix Project i.e. high level?

I didn’t know a sequel exists. Is the scope the same as the Phoenix Project i.e. high level?

The sequel, the Unicorn Project is more low level, as it follows Maxine as she navigates through all the muck. Early in the book she gets thrown under the bus and put onto the Phoenix project and struggles for weeks just to get a build for the Phoenix project going.

I will say the book goes into more technical fads then the first one, there’s talk about functional programming, Slack, the cloud, CI/CD, virtualization, Docker, etc etc. They don’t go into deep details, but they do go over using that sorta stuff in the workplace to solve existing problems.

It was just as good of a read as the first book, but then again like I said I’m biased because I’m also a developer haha.

Ive read it a couple months ago too. It’s funny, because I accidentally bought it and ended up almost devouring it in a few weeks hahaha. Looking forward to read the next one.
As I’m sysadmin (still aspiring developer), I felt and shared most of the pains Bill did throughout the book. Strongly recommend this reading.
And I agree with @sculprog when he said:

sculprog:

I find in more non-tech companies you see more Bills because most departments don’t care about technology. They treat it as another machine or appliance they need to do their work. And when things don’t work… they look at the tech leader as the source of the problem.

However, this scenario is slowly changing. Today, every company, not matter what its business is, in order to survive and stay competitive, it must adopt IT as one its main strategy players. I would say every company today, is also an IT company. Or it dies. hahaha

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